James Soane, Architect
"We need to talk about how materials look, how they age and what happens next"
James Soane is a qualified architect, teacher and writer having studied at Cambridge and the Bartlett. He set up Project Orange with Christopher Ash and joined full-time in 2001 having been a director of Sir Terence Conran’s design company Conran & Partners.
James’ recent projects include a new build house in Moscow and for the same client the transformation of a steel works into a new start-up hub. He has overseen a number of residential projects in London and is currently working on phase 3 of Rathbone Market, a £30m new building housing project in East London. In addition there are hotels in India and UK, the Himalayan Rock Garden at RHS Chelsea and a regeneration scheme in Wandsworth.
He has taught architecture at the Bartlett, UCL, and Kingston University from first year through to Masters level. In 2012 he ran the final diploma project at KLC in London. He is currently the Chair of the RIBA New Courses Committee, Vice Chair of Education Committee and recently an RIBA Awards Judge. In the past few years he chaired RIBA Validation boards to Beirut, Singapore, Hull, China and Manchester. He is a frequent contributor to the architectural press and continues to be a guest critic at UCL as well as lecturing around UK. In 2012 he presented at paper at the ‘Theory by Design’ conference in Antwerp and spoke at the Sleep event in London.
As an author he wrote ‘New Homes’ published by Conran Octopus in August 2003 and ‘Catalogue’ on the work of Project Orange, published by Black Dog Publishing. He has participated in 100% Design, the Sleep Event, the 2008 Oxford Education conference and the AJ Hotel conference 2009. The research outcomes of the practice, published in PO Box, were shortlisted for the 2011 RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding Practice-located Research. PO Box2 was published in June 2014.
James will be a Speaker durning the Ecoweek event in London & also he will be a consultant on Ecoweek workshops.
